with Christiane Blattmann, Isabella Costabile, Alice Creischer, Frank Diersch, Chris Evans, Benjamin Husson, Jochen Lempert, Perri MacKenzie, Jannis Marwitz, Emily Pope, Batsheva Ross, Niklas Taleb

and with a title in honour of Annette Wehrmann

J. and I have now begun to exchange thoughts on how to approach the exhibition. To organize an exhibition as artists hands you the keys to a sort of different space, one where things don’t have to make sense initially, but intuition has its place for starters. Maybe there’s a trust in the works and artists chosen to weave their own connections and layers and we ourselves can be curious as to how this space, to which we all are the key, can later be described. We’re considering to ask a few artists who were important on our path to finding our own artistic language. Next, our contemporaries, who are around and who are part of the conversation. Finally to invite positions who we don’t personally know, whose work we only take in from afar but recognise as an influence.

We were slightly nervous after we told F. and M. about our first ideas and both of them independently stated that the exhibition would be “pretty packed.” We also argued about these type of formal questions ourselves a few times, but ultimately always return to our extreme confidence in the independency of the works, which do not have to fulfill any expectations in our space.

A dream of mine was to show one of Annette Wehrmann’s brick balls in the exhibition. My encounter with these raw, almost shapeless objects during my time in Hamburg - half wall, half projectile - has been a real eye opener. She must have been so nonconform as an artist: where the balls were shown she kicked them around the exhibition spaces, to desecrate, as a representative of the public realm, the pristine quality of the walls. We were already in touch with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, who apparently owns the majority of the sculptures, but were not given much hope. Maybe there are other ways to include Annette Wehrmann in this exhibition. Would she actually want that?

Strange to not be able to ask someone anymore and to only speculate based on our own perspective that we would have something to say to each other. Or is it almost more important to assume that the works themselves have something to say to each other? Her works and our works?

When we asked I. to participate she asked us to send her the curatorial concept. That tripped us up. It is obviously easier to believe in the autonomy of the works or even the exhibition itself, when you know each other personally. (Where does an artwork end and its context begin?) During a subsequent Zoom meeting it was easy to formulate something “conceptual,” by simply stating the existing connections between the already chosen works. Part of me though is loath to putting thoughts on paper that want to unlock whatever is going to happen betwween the works. (By the way, it was beautiful how A. said - when she initially wanted to produce a new work for us - that she presently doesn’t manage to kiss, since her lips refuse to kiss any current news).

I’m very happy about E. wanting to put her posters up in the windows, for we have a hunch that there exists an impulse between all the works, to communicate not only internally, that the space (and I’m not only talking about Sundy) is not a hermetic one. Maybe the brick missile is present after all...

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